


Personal Notes (28) Busy Day

by longhairshortfuse



Series: Carlos's Secret Diary [28]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Domestic Fluff, For Science!, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-11
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-02-04 07:48:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1771321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longhairshortfuse/pseuds/longhairshortfuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos makes use of a lazy day off and loses another of his favourite shirts. For science, of course.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Personal Notes (28) Busy Day

Yesterday was hot, very hot even for the desert. I would have said unusually hot but everything here is unusual which makes everything its own kind of normal. We woke up drenched, barely able to stand to touch each other, any point of contact quickly becoming slick with perspiration and itchy. The air con hadn't kicked in as it should and I got up to investigate. I trudged downstairs to the lab, wearing shorts and only my lightest lab-coat for modesty, and found the power off. The circuit breakers had tripped but resetting them made no difference. It would not be possible to work in the stifling heat. I texted the team to say take the day off and called the power company to find out what had happened. They said it only affected our block and would be fixed by the afternoon but couldn't tell me what the fault was.

I went back upstairs and found Cecil under a cool shower. It was too hot to join in, I felt drained and lethargic. No electricity meant no coffee but at least the power outage was recent enough that the contents of the fridge were still cold. Normally, an unexpected bonus day off would mean spending extra time distracting Cecil. But today we just didn't feel like it. Still under the cool water jets, he asked me how radio transmissions worked. I explained that his microphone converted a pressure wave in the air into an electrical signal with the same frequency as the sound of his voice, then the transmitter converted this into an electromagnetic wave. I lost him a bit here and had to backtrack. I said that radio waves were like light only stretched, so these radio waves travelled at the speed of light in all directions. An aerial pointing at the correct angle would pick up the radio waves and turn them back into an electrical signal because the alternating electromagnetic field would push the electrons in the metal back and forwards... His eyes glazed over. I think I am getting better at noticing when I am losing his attention. I backtracked again and simplified. I told him that the receiver and amplifier sent the electrical signal to the speaker which made a pressure wave in the air at the listener's radio, with the same properties as his voice only with a bit of hiss from random noise and interference. I decided not to embark on an explanation of amplitude modulation, frequency modulation and the merits of digital over analogue. For now.

Cecil dressed as professionally as usual in an impractical number of layers and said it was time he went to work. I said, as always, that the passage of time isn't real, merely an illusion created by our minds and the universe exists as a constant with no single instant any more or less significant than any other, all the moments we call past, present and future on top of each other. He kissed me goodbye before going out to the quiet street and into his car. I watched as he turned the ignition and imagined sitting in the cool blast from the car air con. That would be... neat.

As Cecil's favourite word popped into my head I mused on how we are starting to mirror each other's mannerisms. I have started saying things are "neat", to the amusement of my co-workers. I have noticed Cecil fiddling with his hair when he is writing, the way I sometimes do when I am concentrating. I know there is some psychological evidence that mirroring helps people to cooperate socially. I looked up mirror neurones in one of Ell's textbooks but found my brain unable to process some of the details. Perhaps I will ask Ell to explain how they work when she returns. I am a little concerned that she has been away from the lab for so long but she emails regularly. I miss her a little despite that she has been distracted and distant towards me. I suspect she is suffering from the effects of stress. I want to talk with her about how my relationship with Cecil is developing. I mentioned her absence to Cecil. He looked at me for a moment then looked away, as if he had been about to say something but forgotten what it was.

After a cold shower that I didn't want to end and a still cold drink from the refrigerator, I felt better. Lowering my body temperature slightly made me more able to dissipate the heat produced by cellular respiration in my muscle tissue and therefore more inclined to movement.

I started preparing my apartment for my move out and Gio's move in. We don't have a house yet but we know what we want. We have viewed and rejected a couple of places on the basis of size and stench. I mowed the little shared lawn around the side of the lab. The particular species of grass has stiff blades with a resonant frequency similar to the frequency of the mower blades and when I stilled the roar from the petrol engine I could hear it vibrating with a kind of whistling sound. To investigate further, I got down level with the grass and whistled the same tone. I could see the blades quivering and heard them emit a quiet reply. I texted Cecil because I thought he might know more about the local vegetation but since he hadn't warned me about what the indelible grass in a secluded corner of Mission Grove Park would do to the back of my favourite shirt when I dragged him away from the station for an unscheduled break one day last week, I didn't hold out hope for a scientific reply. I wondered at the time why he lay with his full weight on me, not touching the grass at all, but I had other things to think about. Like "will anyone see us acting like a pair of teenagers" and "what can I think about that isn't the inviting pressure of Cecil's genitals against mine despite four layers of fabric". My shirt was ruined. Cecil said something cryptic like "three down, three to go" and insisted on getting me a new shirt on the way back to the station. He does have good taste, he made me try on a few things then settled on a black tailored shirt that made him do that infuriating "mmhmmmhmm" noise when I came out of the changing room. Infuriating when he does it whilst looking at anyone else.

I went back up to the apartment and had another shower to cool off. Afterwards I checked my phone to see if Cecil had replied and found the internet browser open and a site about beekeeping loaded. I looked for the flicker at the edge of my vision but it, she, was absent. I said, "I doubt the neighbours would let us keep bees, but I'll ask if you want," to the room in general. There was a dangerous sounding crackle from the toaster as response, despite the power still being off. I considered investigating, I am an anomalous energy scientist after all and might be able to help. Cecil had replied to my text, but only with a picture. He sent a selfie of his head slumped onto the desk beside his microphone, eyes half closed and mouth half open, a sticky note on his forehead bearing the inscription "Too hot for radio."

I decided to get some cleaning and organising out of the way. I sorted the contents of my closet, which did not take long. I sent Cecil a video clip of me putting on a red checked shirt and saying please can I keep this one. 

I headed out to see what was wrong at the local electricity substation. As I went outside, feeling the full force of the heat, I started to feel lightheaded. Within a few moments I realised that there was some kind of gravitational anomaly affecting the area. It lasted just long enough for me to float gently up to the roof of my block and remove some of the vegetation blocking the guttering before returning me to ground level a little faster than was comfortable. I wondered if the gravitational anomaly had affected the electromagnetic fields that permeate the town and surrounding area and made a mental note to check for unusually unusual readings once power was restored. The sensors should all be working from their battery backups but would be unable to send their data remotely to my computer until the electricity came back on.

I walked slowly out to the local substation to find a pair of electrical engineers wearing shorts, hi-viz vests and little else looking at the nearest transformer. I shouted to them, asking how long it would be before power was restored. They shrugged and said they needed a new set of ceramic insulators to replace the ones damaged. Something, they did not know what, had been feeding off the power grid and touched the high voltage input to a step-down, shorting it out and leaving a charred branch-like limb behind. I looked at the remains more closely. Not exactly branch-like, although blackened and dry, there were small circular raised areas on one side. I shuddered, half a memory rising but not quite breaking the surface, like the fading memory of a bad dream. For some reason I was reminded that I really hate squid. I asked what type of insulator they needed and by chance I had some at the lab, scavenged from a problem with random power outages months ago. I fetched them and asked if I should help instal them. The electricity workers just shrugged and let me into the locked compound. 

I woke up several feet away from the transformer with my head pounding, my skin tingling unpleasantly and my shirt gone except for a few still burning shreds of red check fabric nearby. The engineers apologised for not having warned me about the anti-trespass defence shield, picked up the scattered ceramic insulators and completed their repairs before helping me up. They had the decency to check that I was mostly unharmed before laughing at me. At least the power came back on. I sent Cecil a picture of the burning fabric, with the caption "Disintegrated for science."

On my way back to the lab we had an unexpected solar eclipse. Eclipses happen more frequently than the Olympic Games, but like the Olympics we can predict where and when they will happen. This one was not predicted. The light and heat faded over a few minutes and the Sun was partially obliterated by a dark object, casting an eerie shadow. Birds stopped chirping and settled in the trees. Some of the trees appreciated this very much if I interpreted correctly the occasional loud and then muffled squawk followed by the gentle flutter of feathers to the ground. After the unscheduled eclipse the temperature dropped by a few degrees, enough to turn the day from uncomfortably hot to pleasantly scorching. I went home to have yet another shower, put on my second-last flannel shirt and listen to the radio. 

Some of Cecil's news reports worried me considerably. This girl, Tamika who Kirandeep trusted with her life in the library, has formed a militia with all of the library survivors and is training them out in the sand wastes. She quoted the opposite of the StrexCorp "mission statement" and talked about war. Later, when we went for a late-night stroll to avoid being listened to in the apartment, I asked Cecil about Tamika, whether it was right to allow or indeed encourage such a young girl to be out playing at soldiers. He looked at me, shook his head and said, "She is the only one who can lead an army, they are the only ones who understand and are prepared to fight for us all." He said that Kiran's additions to her book are helpful and although often merely recommendations for books that Tamika might enjoy, they occasionally communicate parts of StrexCorp's official documents.

I was pleased to hear Cecil give a simple but clear description of the basics of how radio communication works. I guess he was listening after all. Cecil slipped in another reference to Strex at the end of this, telling us to distrust. He really is going to get into trouble one day.

I texted Cecil to say that I had quite an eventful day and was tired so might need to be woken up when he got back, assuming he was coming over. His reply was either completely innocent or a rude wordplay, in either case he was on his way. I had my third cool shower of the day while I waited for him, mostly to keep me awake. I didn't hear the door over the hiss of the water jets and jumped a little as Cecil slipped into the shower behind me.

It turned out that there was nothing innocent about his last text.


End file.
